Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade

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The Cosplay Lynch-Mob

It was an odd internet scandal even by the standards of our post-truth age. Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, a man whose grasp of the truth makes Comical Ali look like George Washington, was “outed” in January by the Kotaku fan site, whose minions had been trawling his social media posts looking for something to laugh at. They found it, seemingly, on his Twitter feed for 2013, where he had been enthusiastically hash-tagging a Gundam costume he saw at Katsucon.

Could it really be that, in the year that America jumped the shark, the frowning White House press secretary was a recovering anime fan? And if so, could it be that he was That Guy… you know, That Guy?

No, I didn’t know That Guy, but enthusiastic chatter soon enlightened me – a man at American conventions of a few years back, who dressed up as pathological whiner Shinji from Evangelion. What better illustration of his oft-repeated catch-phrase, “I Mustn’t Run Away”, than appending it to a picture of Spicer standing before the press corps, unreliably informing them that black was white, that crowds were much more biglier than people remembered, and that Evangelion 4.0 was sure to be released very, very soon?

Anime fandom was awash with giggly glee as they tried to hunt down five-year-old cosplay photographs. High-level nerds were put to work on facial recognition software. Everybody was mobilised to get him… but I didn’t understand what for.

“Wait,” I asked. “If that’s really Spicer dressed as Shinji, why would you laugh at him? Because he’s a cosplayer? Because he likes Japanese cartoons?” Isn’t that shooting all your fellow anime fans in the feet? It seemed like an oddly mean-spirited and self-destructive form of protest, discovering that one’s enemy was a bit like you, and then laughing at him for it.

Spicer and I are the same age, and the world is a small place – it turned out we had a mutual acquaintance. He’d been a hard-core otaku at the same college as Spicer, and reported that he had zero interest in anime in the 1990s. If he were a fan, he was something of a late bloomer, and these days probably had other things on his mind than assuring people they have five minutes until the planet explodes. But fandom should lay off trying to shame itself.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #161, 2017.